I/O performance was something that I was curious about it when I built it, especially if using encrypted disks (LUKS) with such a low-power machine, so I did some very basic tests and the results are below. All tests are done with a large (3.5GB) file/data, intentionally larger than the memory. They involve writing to an ext4 filesystem (default configuration with RHEL6) sitting over a RAID0 MD array. Disks are 2 x Seagate SpinPoint M8/ST1000LM024 1TB 2.5″.

I’ve got to emphasise that these are quick and dirty initial results to give an idea; I’ve not analysed them deeply and there might be methodological flaws (e.g. I didn’t force caching off)